How To Live Off The Land 8 Month Apprenticeship

Through the Seasons Apprenticeship

Learn How to Live with the Land

Learn how to build your own tiny house, design with passive solar, work with solar panels and other alternative energies, catch water, and build with wood, mud and more conventional techniques.

Gain the skills you need to live off the land

Apprentices will get lot of instruction and hands-on experience planting, growing, and harvesting and preserving annual and perennial food crops, including wild foods and medicinal plants.

Apprentices learn how to tan deer hides and make clothing with the hides. Through this apprenticeship, you’ll get a chance to earn your Permaculture Design Certificate through our Earthskills program.

We ask for a financial contribution of $6,000 for this program.

As well as participating in regular apprenticeship days, participants in the Living Off the Land Apprenticeship will have the opportunity to participate in the Earthskills program (which includes the Wild Edibles Foraging Adventure, the Firefly Gathering, and a portion of the Tiny House class) as well as four other classes of their choice. Here are the classes that Apprentices may choose from:

Our apprenticeship programs are on-site residential immersions (we are open to commuting participants if they have special situations) at Wild Abundance, located near Asheville, NC. These are are the most intensive and intimate program we offer. The apprenticeship program is our humble attempt to welcome a small group to our land every year to venture into the relational process that involves living on the land, building community, renewing culture, developing Earthskills, mentoring and personal growth! Through this immersion, we share the depth and creativity of how we live and the richness of the real life challenges, opportunities and abundance that make up our family, community, home and lives.

Near Asheville, NC and the Blue Ridge Mountains

The area surrounding Wild Abundance is breathtaking! We live in a country neighborhood of amazing and like-minded folks, five minutes from a decent swimming hole, 10 minutes from the Pisgah National Forest, 20 minutes from some of the most biodiverse forests in the temperate world, and 20 minutes from Asheville, a decent-sized town which one past apprentice deemed “the hippie hotspot of the East Coast.”

Our Campus is Unconventional

To read about our facilities, including accessibility for alter-abled people, read about our Campus here.

Local Accommodations

Working and Learning Together

We will be working and learning through all sorts of tasks related to building and homesteading. These may include gardening, carpentry, building with clay and other local or natural materials, sawmill work, small-scale logging, firewood gathering and splitting, wild foods and medicine harvesting and processing, preparing for classes, and more.

Some of the jobs might not be very glamorous. Sometimes self-sufficient homesteading feels like lots of grunt work. There will be some weeks each year when Frank and Natalie will not be available to work with you because of the Firefly Gathering, teaching out of town and personal time off. During these times, we will either set you up with a colleague to work and learn with, or get you going on projects of your own.

Infrastructure

You will have use of an outdoor kitchen space with a great view, an official permitted privy, and a 3 seasons sleeping shelter. We suggest everyone bring a nice roomy tent as well as a tarp or fly that can protect the tent and supply some covered private space to store personal items. We also suggest bringing ample and comfortable bedding. You may prefer to simply sleep under a tarp, in a debris shelter or in a hammock. Go as primitive as you want! These are all fine options, but please consider your own needs and make sure that you are able to provide for them in such a way that you will be comfortable living for an extended period of time in a communal environment that might not necessarily offer you the creature comforts and personal space to which you might otherwise be accustomed.

We have some access to electricity, both on-grid and soon to be off-grid. This power can be sparingly used for charging phones (only US cellular, Republic Wireless and Verizon phones work here), etc. We tend to have a no laptop rule in the outdoor kitchen. We don’t live in an Internet cafe; we live in the woods, but there will be a designated time for limited internet usage. If you want to use the Internet more frequently or want to get away, you are totally welcome to go to town.

Democrat, NC, has a gas station, a beer store and a diner, and good swimming hole, and is ¾ of a mile away. Barnardsville has a post office and a couple of thrift stores and is 2 miles away. Weaverville is 11 miles away, and has a library, laundromat, grocery store, fancy bakery, and more. Asheville is 18 miles away, takes 22 minutes to reach by car, and has dancing, health food galore, a movie theatre that sells pizza and beer, great music venues, craft stores, and many fun folks.

Transportation

We require that all apprentices provide their own transportation. This means you will need your own car.

Kitchen Etiquette

You will have your own outdoor kitchen space and we request complying with the following:

Safety with fire. We request a high level of care with anything involving fire (rocket stove, lanterns, candles, etc.)

Clean up after yourself, and a little more. If you are cooking for others, please make a verbal agreement about who will be cleaning up the cooking mess.

Each apprentice will have one day each week to be responsible for “super-cleaning” the kitchen. On this day, you will wash any stray dishes, clean counters, oil cutting surfaces and sweep. We find this helps make everyone happy

Alcohol, Tobacco, etc.

We ask that everyone who lives here maintain a balance with substances. We are not at all saying that there is any issue with occasional enjoyment of libations. While we are working together, we prefer that no one is under the effect of anything that may affect their work or safety. I ask that everyone keeps this in mind and makes wise decisions.

We have a preference that folks not smoke around us. Please let us know if you do smoke, so that we can look at some strategies that support us keeping our lungs pink and happy and un-tempted by tobacco and you feeding your habit in a way that is not terribly inconvenient to you.

Dogs

We live in a community that has very restrictive covenants regarding pets. Because of this, we am not currently accepting canine companions of apprentices.

Frequently Asked Questions

Registration Info

Application Process

The first step is to fill out the appropriate application form and to pay your application fee and deposit. We need to receive both an application form and a deposit in order to move forward. After we receive these items, we will contact you within 2 weeks and set up a phone interview during which any additional questions can be answered. After that, if practical geographically, we will schedule a working interview where you will experience a day or half a day in the life of an apprentice. If a working interview isn’t geographically feasible, we will make a decision soon after the phone interview. Click here to complete an application form.

Application Fee and Deposit

We ask for a $50 application fee for the apprenticeship, along with a $250 deposit (a total of $300 when applying), without which we will not consider your application. The application fee covers our administrative costs and the time it takes to process your application and is not refundable. The deposit goes toward your total financial contribution, if you are accepted, and can only be refunded if we do not accept you into the program. Upon acceptance into the program, we ask for the first $1,000 of your contribution within two weeks. Your total financial contribution may be paid in installments but must be paid in full by one month before the apprenticeship starts.

The first two weeks of the apprenticeship will serve as a trial period. This is a chance for us to make sure that the apprenticeship is a good fit for you and for us. After the two-week trial period, we will have a meeting and if the apprenticeship is not working for either party, we will discuss issues and try to work through them, or make a clean break. Your deposit may be returned at this point.

Please fill out an application and pay your deposit as soon as possible if you are interested.

About Us

Wild Abundance is here to empower people with skills for self-sufficiency and interdependence. We develop deeply meaningful and effective classes, programs, and demonstration sites to bring people closer to the each other and to the web of life. We believe that these skills are humanity's legacy; we strive to make them accessible to all people with a hunger to learn through sliding scales and scholarships.